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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
The purpliest alien Amenta has ever seen has a very, very bad year.
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out-of-hours
out-of-hours
That is even worse than I expected! I would ask "what is wrong with your world," but you are practically the only person whose fault it ISN'T!
out-of-hours
Sorry about that. Anonymous online groups? Countries with extreme freedom-of-speech laws such that there are a few clean sympathizers who are living with their lives being destroyed? People who are extremely loud about how much they hate pollution but oddly enough tend to vote against every anti-red bill?
be_fruitful
There are some people online who are presumably either very anonymous or living with their lives being destroyed. I don't know if any of us knows any of them as individuals but it's a specific enough target I can find out.
out-of-hours
If this is a serious risk for you, I may be able to contact them myself without that. In your judgement, though, who would you say is the most reliable and capable person online I could trust with this?
be_fruitful
Note that some people with anonymous accounts wherein they rant about red rights are red, so be circumspect even if they'd already have ruined a clean life if they had one. I've been fond of this blog though it's less active recently.
be_fruitful
The blog is titled "Conspecific" and it's by an ostensible green in Doet. In addition to red rights they write about Doetaran politics, their favorite trading card game, and the occasional movie review.
out-of-hours
... Hmm. He'll read the blog, try to make sure the person seems generally sensible to him, and think about the appropriate way of handling this.
The basic question is, does he run his fancy textual-analysis software to determine this green's identity or not? He isn't going to share it, obviously, but checking whether the ostensible green is green or not would make a lot of sense.
It also might get the green killed, if it ever came out. But it would make him know much more about the crisis. Decisions, decisions...
out-of-hours
... Ultimately, what settles his decision is that if he's successfully being spied on, everyone he's been talking to is going to die and he's doomed. Doing a basic check to see if he should pull this person into the mess beforehand is worth it, and is probably more likely to help than hurt.
He possesses textual analysis software. Who is the author of Conspecific? What else have they written? What caste are they?
out-of-hours
Time to send a message.
Hello. I am Nau, the alien who recently crashed in Tapa, and I want to talk to you about a topic of mutual interest. Can I ask you to request a confirmation signal that I can make so you can trust me enough to have this conversation?
out-of-hours
I would rather not, for reasons you can deduce from the fact that I'm talking to you. I can, however, highlight arbitrary information in the text corpus (such as these three books you might find interesting: link. do a public information dump on any non-politically-explosive topic of your choice, or make specific gestures on camera.
out-of-hours
Understood.
That's not as good as he'd want, but -
I am not tremendously happy about how reds have been treated on Amenta, which is stupendously happier than any other member of my civilization would be, since I am much less moral than they are. If they arrive and the present situation is in place, they will consider essentially all Amentan governments oppressive tyrannies, and, at the least, be disinclined to help them. I would like to fix this issue before they arrive in a manner which neither involves massacres, nor leaves most Amentans feeling that the entire galaxy is polluted. I think you are one of the right people to talk to on this topic, being both clean and able to see the blindingly obvious fact that something is horribly wrong.
be_fruitful
Huh. You know, I originally came to my position via thought experiments about aliens but I didn't actually expect it to be confirmed in my lifetime.
The obvious thing to do is to come up with some way to render them clean. Unfortunately it has to be cheap. Spending money on reds is incredibly unpopular.
out-of-hours
Congratulations! The aliens agree with you! I commend you on reaching the correct conclusion and have no idea how you're almost the only one!
I have, in fact, come up with a possible solution for that, which the government of Tapa is quietly looking into the practicality of. I am a cyborg; my brain is the only part of me left, which is encased in a nigh-indestructible metal shell, which is itself encased in a robotic body my brain pilots. This apparently means that even if I had an inherently polluted brain, I could interact with the world perfectly well. By converting all reds into cyborgs like me, we could render them perfectly contained; while my cyborg body is sterile, my civilization has artificial wombs and the ability to synthesize arbitrary biologicals, including sperm and egg cells, which we could use to allow red cyborgs to still have children - which would be clean red children, since they would not have any hereditary pollution. In a generation the problem would be solved.
The problems with that that have been raised so far are - first, the technical issues; humans are not Amentans, we would need to devise appropriate mechanisms for interface, feedback, and control, and these would be different for the different species. Second, the cost; this program is cheap for Imai*, but Imai* is stupendously rich and but Amenta is not. And third, that no one would bother to issue credits for nigh-immortal cyborg reds, even clean ones, dooming them all to childlessness until the League of Meridiana arrives with an eager willingness to hand out spaceships, planets, and terraforming technology to all and sundry.
(Also, the possibility has been raised that red cyborgs wouldn't season, which would allow a wider range of colonies, but I have no idea how that would work; I'm not even a biologist for my own species.)
be_fruitful
I'm not the only one, I'm just unusual in being willing to say it online. I had friends in university and I don't think they've all regressed to the mean, they just don't want to risk their jobs and their reputations when they had no prospects of changing anything.
Things I'd worry about in trying to implement that besides what you mentioned, though all those are also important:
- gene samples for the reds pre-cyborging getting "lost"
- reds being unable to find enough work under the new paradigm (between the robots I'm guessing you have, discrimination for the handful of jobs that don't actually have a caste requirement or would come in under the income cap, and the fact that many reds are "inworkers" and aren't directly in demand by clean customers and wouldn't have skills applicable to cyborgs)
- "tragic accidents" happening to the incubating red babies
out-of-hours
I appreciate all of this. I have no particular solution for the first or third; my influence in the government of Tapa essentially consists of talking to the people they send to talk to me, who are high-level people without direct control over what happens at ground level, which I cannot even observe. The simplest possibilities would be to have decentralized storage of the gene samples and of the incubators; if reds are watching their babies themselves and calling in red incubator technicians or doctors if there's a problem, that might do it, but I have no reason to believe we would end up in that equilibrium.
For the second problem, I expect expect that all castes would have large parts of their work as they now are automated, and I don't know which would end up with a greater or lesser proportion required. Imai* has never found that it is possible to render humans unemployable without irreparable brain damage, but our historical solutions involved a great deal of what you would call changing castes. I don't know how to adapt them to Amenta, which does not permit it. Anonymous online work?
(Nau quickly scans an economics textbook to see if his economists have already solved this problem for him. Aaanything in there about functioning in caste systems? 'They're dumb'? Thank you, economics textbook, I already knew that, Amenta's stuck with them anyway.)